Popular social networking website Facebook and its sub-services including WhatsApp and Instagram have been facing a service outage for a few hours in several regions. Hashtags labelled #WhatsAppDown, #InstagramDown and #FacebookDown have been trending on the microblogging website Twitter.
The Social Media Outage
While the cause of the outage hasn’t been revealed, it was speculated to be a DDoS style attack. The aforementioned attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic to a web property where multiple compromised systems, which are often infected with a Trojan computer virus, are used to target a single computer system. However, a post shared on Facebook’s official Twitter account dismissed the claims. The outage mainly affected parts of New England; the US; parts of Latin America; the UK; India; and the Philippines. Some cases of it were also reported in from Canada and Turkey.
We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
— Meta (@Meta) March 13, 2019
Facebook’s advertisement section was also reported to be not functioning, and it prompted an error message when users tried to buy an advertisement set on the platform. It was also suggested that the website is weighing in on the option to return the advertiser’s money because of the issue, but no official statement on the matter has been released yet. With the desktop website of Facebook down, people also reported posts on the Instagram application not loading. The Stories function of the service also was reported to be down, as was the button to post new media.
We’re aware of an issue impacting people's access to Instagram right now. We know this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to resolve this ASAP.
— Instagram (@instagram) March 13, 2019
Also read: Best Wireless Earphones In India Under Rs 2,000
Similarly, Whatsapp was also not working for users when they tried sending a message. Notably, if users try to log in on apps like Spotify, Saavn through Facebook, the functionality would be down. All the services that went down were owned and managed by Facebook Inc. As of now, the services seem to be restored for the majority of users. Also, one can check the affected areas by visiting the following website.
Leave a Reply